I used chrome for a while and really liked it, but whenever a website came up with a shockwave object, my browser would slow to a crawl. I stick with firefox now.

Well, I like both these browsers. A few good things and bad things (other than the ones you obviously know).

Also, they are pretty much exactly as fast. I've done some testing on opening up things (like 200 boxarts on Gamerankings, that's 1MB), and they are as good as totally equal in speed. There are other things you should look at than speed.

Opera:

Positive

- Very reliable, doesn't shut down a lot.

- Easy to download newer flash player or things that don't come with Opera

- Customisable.

Negative:

- Wants you to upgrade all the time, if you don't, it will keep hassling you about it, and there is very little change from update to update

- Easy to mess up and delete what you have written and such, due to a hell of a many shortcuts (like ctrl M exitted Opera and all the pages you where on if you on 9.52) If you use some time though, it should be piece of cake to get used to/change those hotkeys.

- Sometimes uses a few seconds to start up, perhaps more if your computer is slow.

Chrome

- Opens up instantly

- Uses even less Ram than Opera (although this doesn't matter a lot)

Negatives:

- Unreliable, can shut down, or just mess up.

- Not nearly as easy to download updates to flash players and such.

- You can encounter some issues if you try to download things, such as it suddenly saying you should download it through Google (which is impossible), and not letting you download it.

@oyvoyvoyv

Chrome uses a lot of RAM, and I mean a lot.  It's usage is comparable to IE8, which I remember reading an article that said it uses as much RAM as Windows XP.  You will see a lot of articles that will confirm this.  Here is one.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/03/2244226&from=rss

One thing that makes it hard for non technical people to tell how much RAM chrome uses is because each tab is a seperate process.  This means if you have 5 tabs open, there are 5 processes running, each having it's own RAM.

This leads me to reliability.  Keeping in mind that Chrome is beta. It's design makes it more reliable than firefox, chrome and IE7.  This is because each thread is a it's own process and if one tab crashes, that tab crashes.  This is opposed to one tab crashing and taking your entire browser with it like firefox, chrome and IE7 does.  IE8 uses the same design that Chrome does to keep it's entire browser from crashing.

 Oh, I didn't know that. Thanks for correcting me.

I tend to think the frequent updates are a positive, as practically all minor updates (as in 9.6x) are bugfixes and security patches. Opera has a very good track record with regards to security, they don't seem to think a small market share is grounds for being lazy with the patches. So you get security-by-obscurity and fast patches to any found security holes, a win-win situation IMO.

my company won't allow the use of Chrome due to 'serious security concerns' so idk and I have always like FF better than Opera. Better overall package.

Firefox is better than both of them.

Yeah, but it should 1) Tell you what the hell you are going to download and 2) If you don't want to, not ask you every 5 minutes.

It is really more of a neutral though.